Solutions We LoveMaking a stand for public land, electric trains, and more

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5 Ways

How To Turn Your Love of the Outdoors Into a Stand for Public Lands

Melissa Hellmann

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which crosses into North Carolina and Tennessee, uses volunteers to record data on animal activity and plant blooms.Photo by Jim Schemel/istock

The American public owns roughly 640 million acres of national lands —panoramic views, jutting peaks, and sweeping valleys. More than 400 national parks claim 84 million of those acres, but the majority is
national forests and Bureau of Land Management areas. Government agencies
manage the lands for timber harvesting, livestock grazing, and oil and gas
leasing. And each summer, millions of people use wilderness areas for
hunting and fishing, camping, and hiking.

Melissa Hellmann is a YES! reporting fellow and graduate of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Follow her on Twitter @M_Hellmann.

Under the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress, the
future of public lands is uncertain. New rules make it easier for Congress
to transfer federal lands to states, local communities, and Native American
tribes. Critics argue that the move could lead local governments to limit
public access or sell the land to developers. And although Trump has said
he opposes the transfer of public lands, he does want to increase fracking
and drilling.

So while you’re out enjoying open spaces this summer, consider ways to also
stand up for public lands.

1. FIX THE TRAILS

Most trails are maintained by volunteers and always need extra hands to
clear debris and restore the paths. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy
offers volunteer opportunities, while the Pacific Crest Trail also needs
volunteer crews to keep more than 2,500 miles passable throughout the year.
Information about trail maintenance projects can be found at local parks or
by visiting the National Park Service website.

2. Count Animals

Helping scientists count animals and preserve other park resources is an
easy way to merge a love for the outdoors with science. Park naturalists
and conservationists depend on citizens, usually without scientific
training, to help keep tabs on the health of the parks. Glacier National
Park offers opportunities to count mountain goats, pikas, and butterflies.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park needs volunteers to monitor plant
blooming and collect other data on flora and fauna.

3. Restore history

Passport in Time is a program sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service that
connects volunteers with archaeologists and historians to work on public
land projects. Volunteers can help with rock art restoration,
archaeological excavations, and artifact curation. Projects can last
anywhere from two days to several weeks and sometimes involve backcountry
camping. Some activities are also kid-friendly, encouraging entire families
to join.

4. TAKE YOUR ACTIVISM OUTSIDE

Similar to last year’s Standing Rock “water protector” encampments, protest
camps are in need of donations and organizers this summer. The Little Creek
Camp near Williamsburg, Iowa, located on 14 acres of private land, was
founded by Indigenous Iowa. The camp currently focuses on Dakota Access
pipeline resistance and fosters indigenous ideology to promote
sustainability. In Washington state, the Backbone Campaign offers weeklong
summer camps for training in nonviolent direct action, including
“kayaktivism.” At the “Localize This!” camps on Vashon Island, participants
join up with other citizen activists and movement organizers to learn how
to “take action before everything we value or hold as sacred is extracted,
exploited, and extinguished.”

5. Ditch the Car

Want to protest oil and gas leasing on public lands and fossil fuel
infrastructure crisscrossing sensitive ecosystems? Try a park that doesn’t
require a car. Some are in urban settings that are easily accessible. The
Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, for example, is 157,000
acres and the largest urban national park in the world. And parts of the
park are accessible by bus from Los Angeles. Public transportation also
works for national parks in faraway places. Yosemite can be reached from
San Francisco entirely by public transit: Take a bus or light rail train to
Richmond, transfer to an Amtrak train heading to Merced, then take the
YARTS (Yosemite Area Regional Transit System) bus to Yosemite.

Melissa Hellmann is a YES! reporting fellow and graduate of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Follow her on Twitter @M_Hellmann.

A Solution Too Big to Fail: Electrify the Trains

Stephen Miller

Illustration by J. Craig Thorpe from Solutionary Rail

Over the phone, it’s clear that Bill Moyer is frustrated. “We’re not talking about some kind of Elon
Musk-vacuum-tube-Jetsons-freaking-cartoon fantasy,” the Northwest resident says. “We’re talking about something that has a proven history.”

Stephen Miller wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Stephen is a senior editor at YES! He writes about climate justice.

Moyer has been begging Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to invest in a
renewable energy-powered freight rail line from Seattle to Chicago. But
the governor has shown little interest, although he recently asked the
state Legislature to approve $1 million to study an ultra-high-speed
passenger train from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C. “We’d love for him to
show some leadership for the entire state on something that’s not so
pie-in-the-sky,” Moyer laments.

Futuristic commuter trains are one thing, but Moyer has his sights set
on an idea that is at once larger in scope and more firmly grounded in
existing technology.

Moyer is a good-natured musician and progressive activist who has lived on
Vashon Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle, since 1989. He has a mop of
curly dark hair and speaks in the laid-back tone you’ve heard at your local
bike shop. These days, he often sports a black T-shirt that proclaims the
name of his progressive advocacy organization, the Backbone Campaign. It
was this group that researched and authored the recently released Solutionary Rail, a 126-page book filled with charts, maps,
graphs, and tables to support the feasibility of a bold electrified rail
proposal.

The idea seeks to address two significant problems facing the country. On
the one hand, the overwhelming scientific consensus warns of an impending
climate catastrophe for which we are woefully unprepared. On the other, the
country’s bridges and roads are, in fact, crumbling. The American Society
of Engineers awarded the country a D+ in 2016, as it has consistently since
1998. During his first address to Congress in February, President Donald
Trump ignored climate change but called for $1 trillion to fill cracks in
the nation’s infrastructure, which largely accommodates fossil fuel-hungry
automobiles.

Illustration by J. Craig Thorpe from Solutionary Rail

Transportation accounts for nearly a third of the country’s carbon
emissions, of which 84 percent is attributed to cars and commercial trucks,
the EPA reports. So, as Moyer sees it, it’s obvious that climate change and
infrastructure should be tackled in tandem. “The biggest climate impact we
can have is getting the trucks off the roads, and eventually getting people
back to the tracks, as well,” he says. To do this, the Backbone Campaign
proposes revitalizing and electrifying America’s rail system, powering it
entirely with community-owned renewable energy.

The plan would update existing freight railways by adding overhead wires to
carry high-voltage electricity generated in towns along the lines and
smoothing out turns too tight for high-speed travel. It would swap diesel
locomotives for electric engines that are 35 percent cheaper to operate and
that haul freight five times more efficiently than trucks. In many places,
it would add additional track to free up passenger rail that would
otherwise get stuck behind delayed freight. And it would do all of this
with a focus on justice—for the people who live alongside dirty and noisy
diesel train lines, for current and future rail workers and the
underemployed millions who would benefit from a large-scale infrastructure
undertaking, for communities that could find economic security in renewable
energy generation, and for those around the world whose lives are already
threatened by global warming.

It’s a grandiose idea, perhaps even improbable, but Moyer is known in
progressive circles for being someone who gets things done. His track
record includes the “kayaktivist” blockade that confronted Shell Oil in
Puget Sound and the 150-foot replica of the Constitution, signed by
thousands, which tumbled down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in protest
of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United.

In truth, electric rail is not such a long shot. China and Russia have
already invested heavily in electrifying more than 40 percent of their
railways. The Trans-Siberian Railway—the world’s longest at 5,772
miles—went fully electric in 2002, and Russia now moves about 70 percent of
its freight over electrified lines. France, Italy, and Germany have also
electrified as much or more than half of their rails, according to the CIA
World Fact Book.

As Solutionary Rail recalls, the United States operated more than
3,000 miles of electrified rail up until the 1960s— granted, none of it
powered renewably—when the influential auto industry and the subsidized
interstate highway system pushed rail to the back burner.

“If Eisenhower had signed the high-speed rail bill instead of the
interstate bill, the country would be connected by rail,” says former
Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood.

Given the rail’s potential for American employment, manufacturing, and energy independence, it would seem that a case could be made to set aside a portion of Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure request to break ground on “solutionary rail.”

A congressman who sat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure
Committee, LaHood had a bipartisan approach that helped him become the only
Republican appointed to Obama’s cabinet who had been elected to public
office. In 2009, he was given the unenviable task of rallying votes for
Obama’s Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which appropriated about $830
billion to kick-start the flagging economy.

The act leveraged $48 billion for transportation, of which about $10
billion was earmarked to establish intercity high-speed rail, including a
line between San Francisco and Los Angeles that’s now under construction.
This investment was projected to create tens of thousands of jobs and
stimulate U.S. manufacturing while directly addressing global climate
change.

“Obama wanted to send a message to the country that we need to start
investing in high-speed rail,” says LaHood, who was not aware of
Solutionary Rail but has been a staunch proponent of high-speed trains. “If
you look at cities all over America, they’re investing in their metro
systems, in their bus systems, because a lot of these young people who are
moving to D.C. or Chicago or L.A., frankly, they don’t want a car.”

But Republican governors such as Florida’s Rick Scott and Wisconsin’s Scott
Walker rejected the money outright, and legislators resisted further
budgeting for rail projects. “Because it was a part of the economic
stimulus, Republicans didn’t like it. Because it was Obama’s idea to invest
in rail, people didn’t like it,” LaHood says. “Our Achille’s heel in
America is that our national government hasn’t invested in rail.” Tired of
the bitter political divisions between Congress and the White House, LaHood
resigned after one term.

Moyer understands the frustration of waiting on politicians. The Backbone
Campaign seeks instead to effect change from the ground up through what
Moyer calls a non-ideological coalition of unconventional allies—farmers,
environmental activists, renewable energy developers, and labor experts.
The idea to focus on rail emerged from ongoing grassroots efforts to resist
coal trains and the development of the Pacific Northwest into a fossil fuel
corridor to Asia.

Moyer knew next to nothing about railroads or the people who work on them,
but he assembled a team of experts that includes a senior Amtrak engineer
and a whistleblowing union member who, in 2013, sent Moyer a copy of a
paper on railway modernization with a note: “Let’s see if you and your
people can green this.”

The team spent three years considering the global context (the U.S. is way
behind), studying the efficiency of electric locomotion (even with today’s
low fuel prices, the per-mile cost of diesel energy is nearly twice that of
an electric train), mapping renewable source availability (every state has
something), examining the impact of long-haul trucking (60 percent of
highway maintenance costs are due to heavy trucks), and meeting with
economists to address the Herculean task of funding.

“Greening” trains was only the start. Moyer, whose Jesuit parents worked on
Native reservations, was born and raised until age 12 on land belonging to
the Yakama and Spokane tribes. He was exposed to racism and cultural
genocide early on and recognized that, in America, railroads carry a
two-faced cultural memory. The trains that connected the East Coast to the
West and ushered in an age of industrialization for many also brought a
wave of terror and misery for millions, as pioneers continued to colonize,
decimating buffalo herds and altering the landscape forever.

Solutionary Rail
could not move forward without acknowledging this, and at the proposal’s
moral center is a commitment to a just transition—a shift to a sustainable
economy that addresses the inequities and injustices currently borne by
laborers and marginalized people. The rights of workers and Native people
had to be part of the equation, Moyer says.

The team’s ultimate vision is national. They see electric trains zipping
passengers between metropolises, picking up grain in rural towns, and
delivering to coastal ports. The railways that already crisscross the
country offer rights of way that, outfitted with power lines, would allow
electricity generated by Iowa windmills not only to propel the trains, but
also to power cities many miles away. Of course, all of this will require
major upfront investment.

Illustration by J. Craig Thorpe from Solutionary Rail

Single-track electrification costs an average of $2 million a mile. To
demonstrate the feasibility of his national plan, Moyer proposes
electrifying the Northern Corridor from Seattle to Chicago—4,400 miles in
all—at a base cost of $11 billion. A separate analysis from the Great
Northern Corridor Coalition in 2012 indicates that, by 2035, rail service
could make up the cost in public benefits, but that still doesn’t resolve
the conundrum of initial investment. Backbone’s solution is to couple
private investment with a public entity that would issue tax-free bonds at
low interest rates and oversee funding and construction.

Given the rail’s potential for American employment, manufacturing, and
energy independence, it would seem that a case could be made to set aside a
portion of Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure request to break ground on
solutionary rail. But in March, the administration released a budget
proposal that called for significant cuts to long-distance Amtrak service.
If the idea seemed like a long shot before, the odds under the new
administration appear to have worsened.

LaHood, pointing to the president’s New York connections, expects Trump’s
infrastructure vision to go beyond roads and bridges, but he notes that the
clock is ticking. “A president in their first year has an opportunity to
get two or three big things done and then their window of opportunity
closes,” he says. “He’s talked a good game about infrastructure. If he
follows through, Congress will follow his lead.”

Moyer is surprisingly unshaken by the election’s result. “The emphasis was
already on the states, not the federal government,” he says, and whether
Trump can be influenced is somewhat immaterial to the need for bottom-up
organizing.

“The credibility of change agents largely depends on not just their
capacity to articulate an oppositional stance on something that is wrong or
evil or destructive; their moral authority and capacity to move society
requires that they have a viable alternative, a proposition,” Moyer says
confidently. Solutionary Rail is his proposition.

Stephen Miller wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Stephen is a senior editor at YES! He writes about climate justice. .

People We Love

Fact Checkers

J. Gabriel Ware

Alex Baumgart

Keeping candidates accountable

Alex Baumgart knew the moment he learned about the Watergate scandal in the
sixth grade that he would end up covering politics for a living. Baumgart,
now 25, is the individual contributions researcher at the Center for
Responsive Politics, an independent, nonpartisan organization.

During last year’s presidential election, he spent a lot of time keeping
track of the financial contributions candidates received from a variety of
groups, including finance and real estate, fossil fuels, and even from
Hollywood. The organization’s copywriters used Baumgart’s data in articles
published on the organization’s website, Opensecrets.org, which was used as
a fact-checking source for those wanting clarity on where candidates got
their money.

“It’s an accountability thing,” he says. “You want to know who is
financially supporting candidates and how their support may influence
candidates’ policies and regulations. It all comes down to transparency.”

Baumgart says his work carries a tremendous responsibility. Helping
Americans gain access to factual and easy-to-read information about the
role of money in politics and policy, he believes, strengthens the nation’s
democracy.

Angie Drobnic Holan

Ranking degrees of accuracy

Angie Drobnic Holan has always been a political news junkie. When she was
11, she faithfully tuned in to The McLaughlin Group, a weekly
public affairs TV program hosted by political commentator John McLaughlin.

Today Holan is pursuing a similar mission to that of the now-deceased
McLaughlin, but she doesn’t provide commentary on politician’s
statements—she fact-checks them.

In 2007, Holan, who had worked in journalism for nearly 15 years, helped
launch PolitiFact, a fact-checking website run by editors from the Tampa
Bay Times, an independent newspaper in Florida. At PolitiFact, Holan rates
the accuracy of claims made by America’s elected officials, lobbyists, and
interest groups.

Holan uses a variety of fact-checking tools: She asks the politicians
themselves for their sources, and searches online news databases and
archives. PolitiFact won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2008
presidential election and conducted a high-profile fact-checking effort
during the drafting of the Affordable Care Act.

“We debunked a lot of rumors and misconceptions around that law,” Holan
says.

Fact-checking is satisfying work, she says, because it informs democracy.

Gary Ruskin

Taking leads from whispers to fact

Gary Ruskin is the co-founder and co-director of U.S. Right to Know, a
nonprofit food industry watchdog group, where he produces reports that
reveal the harmful effects of chemicals used in the food system.

Ruskin says most of his investigations stem from leads given to him by food
industry insiders and whistleblowers, sources with whom he has made
connections over the past 30 years. Ruskin then tracks down official
documents to fact-check these leads and publishes the documents on the
organization’s website, where members of the public and media professionals
can also use them as a fact-checking source.

In 2013, while director of the Center for Corporate Policy, Ruskin
published Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations
, a report detailing how some businesses spy on nonprofit groups they
regard as potential threats. He says fact-checking information and tips
from sources was a crucial part in publishing the report.

“I really had to put on my fact-checking hat and read documents line by
line with a skeptical eye, because our work is only as good as our
reputation,” Ruskin says. “So if we say things that aren’t true, then no
one would listen to us.”

Commentary

The Case for Truth Seeking (No Matter How Messy)

Robert Jensen

“Is Truth Dead?” Time Magazine’s April 3 cover story about Donald Trump, and the interview on which it’s based, doesn’t answer the question so much as make it clear what we’ve long known: The so-called leader of the so-called free world doesn’t think it’s a relevant question.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University
of Texas at Austin. His latest book is The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men, published by
Spinifex Press. He can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu or through
his website, robertwjensen.org.

First, an aside: I was never a fan of that description of U.S. presidents,
in part because much of the rest of the free world often doesn’t want to
follow our leader (for perfectly sensible reasons, such as a concern for
international law, which the various “leaders of the free world” in my
lifetime have ignored). But these days the moniker seems particularly
ill-suited. We have a president better described as leader of the “free,
one-time offer, while supplies last, call before midnight so you don’t
forget, can you believe the quality at this price, an offer like this is a
once-in-a-lifetime deal” world.

To infomercial hosts, carnival barkers, and other hustlers, questions about
truth just don’t matter much. For them, freedom of expression is all about
the hustle, not truth.

For the rest of us, truth is, of course, never alive nor dead. It’s
something we struggle to see more clearly, to realize day to day, to make
more real in our lives. And that’s always messy business. Truth is always
on life support.

Understanding of the world is the product of a complicated interaction
between our rational and emotional responses; some honest self-reflection
is in order before accusing any specific people in any specific age of
being post-truth or truth-impaired. In our blundering to find the truth, we
are not purely rational computing machines, but complex organic entities. A
bit of humility is useful, for all of us.

I suggest an antidote to the clown in charge of our current three-ring
political circus: going back to basics with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, widely considered a foundational defense of
truth-seeking free speech, published in 1859.

In the most-often quoted passage from the book, Mill makes the case for the
collective search for the truth:

“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more
justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would
be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of
no value except to the owner, if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it
were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the
injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar
evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the
human race, posterity as well as the existing generation—those who dissent
from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is
right, they are deprived of the opportunity for exchanging error for truth;
if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer
perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with
error.”

But Mill is not naive about people’s desire for truth:

“It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any
inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the
stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error,
and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will
generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either.”

And he reminds us that truth seeking comes with no guarantees of success:

“[I]ndeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of
those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass
into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with
instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it
may be thrown back for centuries.”

History is certainly teeming, right before our eyes. Like Mill, we can be
realistic about our truth seeking and keep right on seeking it, committed
to maximal freedom for our collective effort. Truth matters and freedom of
expression to seek the truth matters, even without guarantees.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University
of Texas at Austin. His latest book is The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men, published by
Spinifex Press. He can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu or through
his website, robertwjensen.org.

The Page That Counts

The Numbers That Define Our World

Stephen Miller

Estimated jobs lost among brick-and-mortar stores due to Amazon sales by the end of 2015 295,000 1

Number of U.S. workers Amazon employed at the end of 2015 146,000

Number of robots working in Amazon warehouses at the end of 201415,000 2

At the end of 201645,000

Number of items a warehouse worker is expected to retrieve in a 10-hour shift1,200

Pounds of carrying capacity of one Amazon Kiva robot700

Number of refugees admitted entry to the U.S. since 19753.25 million 3

Number of refugees convicted of attempting or committing terrorism in the U.S. between 1975 and 2015 20 4

Number of Americans who have been killed in terrorist attacks committed by refugees since 1975 3

Country of origin of attackers whose actions resulted in those three deaths Cuba

Border Patrol cameras currently monitoring the Mexican border and ports of entry8,000 5

Underground sensors 11,000

Miles of border fencing that already exist688.66

Cost per mile of border fence constructed in 2007 by the Army Corps of Engineers and National Guard$2.8 million

Cost per mile of fence constructed in 2008 by mostly private contractors$3.9 million

Estimated cost per mile for the border wall called for by President Trump$27 million7

Percentage of Earth’s oxygen provided by rainforests and other land plants 28 8

Percentage of Earth’s oxygen provided by ocean plants, including phytoplankton and kelp70

Average number of breaths a person takes in a day 23,040 9

Breaths for which phytoplankton Prochlorococcus provides the oxygen 1 in 5

Average diameter in inches of an American dinner plate in the 1960s 7 to 9 10